Germaine G. Yergey

Co-Founder

Germaine I. Graff was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. She attended Seton Hall and went on to Dickinson Law School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania — the same institution that would graduate her future husband — where she earned her Bachelor of Laws.

In 1926, she married Chester Arthur Yergey, and together they came to Orlando. When C. Arthur opened his independent law office in 1927 — the practice that became Yergey & Yergey, P.A. — Germaine practiced law alongside him. She was one of the first female attorneys in Florida, and among an even smaller group of women practicing law in Central Florida in the late 1920s.

She practiced with the firm until 1930, the year their only child, David Arthur Yergey, was born in Orlando.

Service During World War II

When C. Arthur was commissioned in the United States Army in June 1942 and deployed overseas, Germaine returned to active legal practice in service of the country. She served as attorney for the U.S. Army Air Corps at the Orlando Army Air Base — a major installation central to the war effort — while their son, then twelve and thirteen years old, managed the family's Fern Grove citrus operation.

Her wartime service as a female attorney in a military legal role was exceptional for the era, reflecting both her professional standing and the trust placed in her by the U.S. Army Air Corps.

A Pioneering Legacy

The name Yergey & Yergey has always described a partnership — not only between generations but, from the very beginning, between two attorneys who built the firm together. Germaine G. Yergey was not an appendage to the firm's founding; she was part of it.

She preceded by decades the generation of women who would enter the legal profession in meaningful numbers in the 1970s and 1980s. Her son D. Arthur, reflecting on his parents' careers, recalled his mother practicing at a time when female lawyers in Florida were a genuine rarity.